


The Aoidoi

by assuwatar



Category: The Iliad - Homer
Genre: Children, Death, Gen, Nonbinary Character, look it's a completely family friendly story!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-05 21:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16818904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/assuwatar/pseuds/assuwatar
Summary: Everyone knows of Homer, and the heroes he inherited from generations and generations of singers before him. But who told the stories first? How did they begin?





	The Aoidoi

‘Muse,’ sang the little girl as she skipped along the beach, ‘tell me about important people.’

She hummed another few notes then broke off, biting her tongue as she scrambled onto a piece of driftwood. She walked along it with arms outstretched, toes curled so she wouldn’t slip, until the sand gave way to sea underneath her. She perched herself on the very end of the wood. She wasn’t afraid. She’d done this hundreds of times before.

‘Muse,’ she sang again,’ tell me about important people.’

They had names, she was sure, but she didn’t know any of them. Her grandmother used to tell her about them before, when the girl was small and naughty – about the man who was given twelve tasks as the price for killing his family, the man with a bull’s head, the man who tried to touch the sun, the man who almost saved his wife from the Underworld and looked back. It was always about what they did and how they were punished. Never about who they were. How their mothers called them.

But then, maybe that didn’t matter. The girl didn’t remember how her mother had called her, either. Come to think of it – she crouched down, humming, and let her palms catch the spray – she didn’t remember her mother at all.

‘Muse,’ she sang, ‘tell me about important people.’

A noise from the beach made her stop and straighten up again. She wobbled back along the driftwood, jumped and felt her feet sink into the wet sand. The noise came again. The girl stepped over the rocks and the debris the morning’s storm had thrown onto the shore, trailing her fingers along the splintered wood, careful not to prick her skin. There was paint here, blue like the sea, and yellow like the tunics southern traders wore. Maybe this was a ship. Well, not anymore.

She found the source of the noise half lying, half sitting behind a circle of boulders, coughing and brushing matted hair out of a wet face. The girl stood and watched. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen a castaway – there were more and more these days, thrown up by the lord of the deep when the lord of the sky shook him too hard. They came from everywhere. Some were from close by, fishermen who wandered away from the coast of Milwatos or Ephesos. Other had strange faces and wore clothes the girl didn’t recognise. This child was one of those, with that dark, shoulder-length hair and that tunic with long sleeves. The girl couldn’t even tell if this was another girl like her, or a boy. To be fair, they looked more like a drowned kitten.

At last, the child stopped coughing and looked up. There was a silence as they stared at each other, the dry girl in ragged, dirty clothes, the strange child with pearls of water on shaking arms. The girl cocked her head. She spoke above the hissing waves.

‘You shouldn’t stay there, you know. The tide’s coming in.’

The other child kept staring and didn’t get up. They wiped their nose on the back of their hand.

‘Where am I?’ A cracked voice, speaking Luwian. The girl didn’t know enough words to answer, but with all the merchants who passed through the port, she could understand all right.

‘Nowhere, really,’ she said in Hellenic. ‘It’s called Thymaina, if you want to know.’

The child nodded. Grasping the closest boulder, they dragged themselves up and staggered over crumbly sand. They lifted up a hand against the setting sun and blinked at the wreckage, the croaking seagulls and bent grass. There were other bodies along the shoreline, the girl noticed now, but none of them were moving. They just lay there, their bellies on the sand. Seaweed wrapped around their legs like blankets.

The other child turned back around towards the girl.

‘Are you from here?’ Luwian again.

‘Yeah.’ Her grandmother had told her how their ancestors had sailed across the sea and beached themselves on this island, but it didn’t seem like much more than another story. They’d come generations ago, and the girl was only seven. She’d known nowhere else than here.

She knelt down and dug a piece of broken wood out of the silt, turned it over in her hands.

‘Where did you come from?’

The other child pointed north.

‘That way. I think. From Wiluša.’

The girl didn’t know the name. She dropped the piece of wood and clambered onto the nearest boulder, sitting herself on the edge, legs dangling down. From here, she had a good view of the beach and the wreckage scattered along it.

‘Is it an important place?’ she asked.

The other child stood up taller – however much they could, with that soaked tunic and that skinny chest – and nodded solemnly.

‘Important enough that our king had a treaty with the king in Ḫattuša. You heard of Ḫattuša?’

‘Yeah. My grandmother says it’s at the end of the inhabited land. So high in the mountains you could touch the lord of the sky.’

‘Well, I saw the treaty with its king. We kept it in the temple of the Sungod.’ The child rubbed their wrists. ‘Us slaves weren’t supposed to go in the archives, but the priests never paid attention to me anyway, so I saw it. It didn’t make a difference in the end, though. The enemies still carried us away, and Wiluša still went up in flames.’

The girl didn’t answer. A lot of places went up in flames. It happened every summer.

Rubbing their nose again, the other child turned their face towards the water. There was a golden line dividing it in two now, and the waves were purple on either side, the colour of rich men’s wine. Seagulls called and circled in the sky. They’d be pecking at the men lying belly-down soon. Then the tide would swallow whatever was left, and that would be the end of the people who set fire to Wilios – or whatever the child said it was called. It was a strange name, hard to remember.

‘Do you have anything to eat?’ said the child. ‘I’m hungry.’

The girl dug through the folds of her clothes. She had an old bread crust somewhere. It was supposed to be her dinner, but she knew how to steal more, and she wasn’t sure this child did. She leant forward and put it in their hand.

‘It’s a bit stale though.’

The child shrugged.

‘Doesn’t matter.’

They bit into it, chewed, swallowed. The girl went back to humming. It was getting dark, dark enough that her grandmother would’ve punished her for being out so late, if she’d still noticed that kind of thing. She was too old to notice most things now. Not that the girl minded, though it did make her sad if she thought about it for too long. It meant she could play on the beach as much as she wanted, gather sea shells, sing half a song and talk to strange children from burnt cities.

‘Do you have a name?’ she asked.

‘Not really,’ the child answered through a mouthful of bread. ‘My masters used to call me Ammiyan.’

‘That’s not Luwian.’

‘No. It’s Nešite. Little thing, that’s what it means.’

The girl looked them up and down. It was quite accurate.

‘Do you have a name?’ the other child asked back.

‘I used to. These days most people call me Sigala.’

‘Silent?’

‘Yeah.’ Her father had given her the nickname, before he left. It was because she’d never cried as a baby. Even now, she didn’t cry. Not even last new moon, when she tripped while running from the baker’s dog and scraped her knees.

‘You weren’t silent before,’ said Ammiyan. ‘What were you singing?’

‘Just an invocation. I don’t know the rest of the song.’ She took in a deeper breath. ‘Muse, tell me about important people.’

Her voice sank into the sound of the waves. The wind blew spray around her and whispered, almost like it was singing back. It didn’t have words, of course. The girl wondered if anybody did anymore. Even clay couldn’t hold speech like her grandmother said it used to.

Well, that was the way it was. She stood up on the boulder and got ready to jump. She was starting to feel cold.

And then she didn’t jump. She widened her eyes. Another silhouette was rising from the wreckage. It walked to the edge of the water, stopped, and gazed at where the sun just set. In a thin voice, it spoke.

‘It began with a quarrel,’ it said.

The words were Hellenic, but with an accent Sigala had never heard before. Ammiyan shivered.

‘That’s the captain,’ they said. ‘I didn’t think he’d survived.’

The man turned his head at the child’s voice, but didn’t move. Other silhouettes were drifting towards him, their faces hidden by the darkness, and they talked in murmurs the girl only just couldn’t make out. She rocked on her heels, almost but not quite daring to creep closer. Something was not right about this, but she didn’t really care. They were telling something. The more they whispered, the more she wanted to know what.

Ammiyan was staring at them too, their drying hair fluttering across eyes that didn’t blink.

‘They’re walking away,’ said the child.

The silhouettes were treading along the shore now, just where the sea met the land, still talking. Sigala dropped down next to Ammiyan. They weren’t going in the right direction – there were only rocks that way, then a cliff and a cave the fishermen kept away from, because of the whirlpools by the entrance. Even so, the men walked like they knew where they were going. It made the girl want to go after them.

‘Let’s find out what they’re doing,’ she said.

The other child hardly hesitated. They made their way through the wreckage, the fuzzy light of the stars showing them where to step. Not all of the men had left. Some of them still lay in the seaweed, and their open eyes stayed fixed ahead as the children slipped past. The girl wrapped her arms around her stomach. I’m not scared, she told herself. I’m not.

The space between her and the men was closing, and she could almost understand what they were saying now. Battles, some were singing, anger and glory. Grief, others breathed back, too much of it. Love, one man said before disappearing into the cave’s mouth. The others slinked in after him. Their voices echoed against the stone.

Without a word, Ammiyan took her hand. They met eyes. Both of them holding their breaths, they walked inside.

There was water in the entrance and the girl curled up her toes against the cold, but then they were on muddy sand again, and then on rock. They stumbled forward while the stories rang out somewhere in front of them. Different notes mixed together, like clinking ship masts when the lord of the sea rolled over and couldn’t sleep. The girl hummed along. It was a pretty song, though she’d never heard anything like it before.

‘And the son of Peleus was irritated,’ the captain was saying, ‘and he replied to the leader of men: doe-hearted wine-sack! You rule over nothing.’

Someone else answered, and then a new voice, in Luwian. There seemed to be more now, though Sigala had no idea where they would’ve come from. Maybe other survivors from other shipwrecks had been waiting here, like fishermen often waited for each other after a storm. Or maybe it wasn’t a question she was supposed to ask. She held out an arm and felt her way along the cave wall. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t going to turn around now.

‘I’m not scared,’ she muttered to herself.

The other child squeezed her hand.

‘Me neither.’

It was pitch black now, though the blackness was moving. Bodies brushed against the girl’s shoulders and said their names over and over again. Some of them spoke languages she’d never heard in her life. She pictured the castaways she’d seen from strange places, with their long, long beards and funny helmets, and tried to fit them to the words. The image made her giggle.

‘Look,’ said Ammiyan, ‘there’s a light.’

It was coming from a very tall man, up in the front. He had a stick, and the light was so dim the girl could only just see it, but she thought there were snakes slithering over it. Ammiyan’s grip tightened, but she didn’t mind this. Snakes were good. You were supposed to leave a bowl of milk out for them, and they’d watch over your house in return. That was what everyone said.

The man turned around and smiled, and he pointed down the cave with his stick. His voice gave Sigala goosebumps.

‘Tell your stories while you can,’ he called out. ‘We’re almost there.’

More voices buzzed around them, and the girl tried her best to understand. They were whispering about a horse now, a wooden one, and someone with many tricks who wheeled it to a city’s gates. The other child took in their breath. They leaned closer to Sigala.

‘The wooden horse, the priests talked about it. Said it was given to a god. Wiluša was burning before I got to see it.’

‘There were three dozen men hidden inside it,’ said one of the silhouettes. ‘The bravest was Diomedes, who drew blood from the gods themselves…’

He went on, and the girl counted heroes on her fingers until she lost track. The voices were melting into the sound of water, and the tall man with the stick had stopped and was crouching on a rock, peering into the shadows. Something was coming forward. Sigala recognised the sound before she saw the shape: it was oars, and a prow digging into the bank, and a grey, very grey man in a cape that went all the way down to his feet, standing on the planks. He didn’t say a word. He held out his hand to the closest silhouette, and he waited.

‘Oh, I doubt these have gold,’ said the man with the stick.

The boatman’s hand stayed open.

‘Without gold they do not cross.’

His voice made Sigala’s stomach flip upside down. The man with the stick fondled the head of one of his snakes, unbothered.

‘I’ll take your complaint up to my uncle, if you like. He was the one who emptied their purses.’

‘Do not laugh about it, Argeiphontes.’ The boatman turned his head slowly to look over the crowd. ‘It is law. Without gold they do not cross.’

‘Times are tough, Kelaine. Great men are dying unburied all over the inhabited land. But I’ll pay you back for them, if you insist. I know a way or two to find you what you need.’

The boatman paused, then pulled his hand back in. He nodded at the first silhouette.

‘Very well. Let them come aboard.’

The man climbed in, then the next, then the next. There was room for them all, somehow, and they hummed as they sat down. The two children edged forward. There were stories all around them, and Sigala didn’t want to miss a single one. Ammiyan was drinking them in too. They were gazing up at an old man talking about someone called Mukšuš, repeating the words to themselves, even though the old man was hardly aware the child was there. Nobody seemed to be aware of either of the children, come to think of it. But that was nothing unusual.

They walked along the shore, mud squelching under their feet, until at last they found themselves next to the boat. The edge was higher than the girl had expected. She reached up, and the boatman reached down to lift her, and she stood on the tip of her toes to catch his hand, and then a stick with two writhing snakes came between them. The tall man brushed the grey man’s arm away.

‘Not so fast, Kelaine,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’s time for this one yet.’

He knelt down and examined Sigala’s face. He had a nice smile, with dimples in his cheeks, though there was something in his eyes that made the girl feel tiny, tiny, tinier than ever before. With a finger, he tapped the tip of her nose.

‘How did you end up here, sweetest one?’

She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. The man’s gaze slid from her to Ammiyan, whose shoulders tensed and pulled up to their neck. The child answered in a little voice.

‘We just wanted to hear the stories.’

The tall man chuckled.

‘Well,’ he said in perfect Luwian, ‘you followed them far.’

‘Too far,’ said the boatman in Hellenic. He drew a cup from his sleeve. It was shiny, made from a metal the girl didn’t know. ‘Make them drink from the river now, before they return. These are things that cannot be remembered.’

The tall man stood up. His snakes wriggled off the stick and along his arm, flicking their tongues.

‘You know what happens to mortals if they drink water from down here. Something of them will never leave.’

‘Nobody reaches this place and goes back whole.’ The boatman rapped a knuckle against the cup. It made a hollow sound, with no echo. ‘Not even you, Argeiphontes, despite all your smiles.’

One of the snakes hissed. The girl grasped the other child’s hand, so hard her fingers hurt. Her eyes and nose felt prickly. Not that she was going to cry, never. She wasn’t scared at all.

‘It was just stories,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t anything bad.’

The tall man smiled at her again. He held out his arm and the snakes slid along it then onto Sigala’s shoulders, over her chest, around her neck. One of them found its way onto Ammiyan, and the child took in a sharp gasp. The other snake nuzzled the girl’s cheek. It stuck out its tongue.

‘You’re right, sweetest one,’ said the tall man. ‘There’s nothing bad about stories, is there?’

The grey man lowered his eyebrows. He swept his hand over the silhouettes in the boat.

‘These ones belong to the lord Aidoneus.’

‘And what belongs to Aidoneus is his forever, I know, I know.’ The man twirled his stick around in his fingers. ‘But mortal lives are short, aren’t they? What we let them have is bound to return to him sooner than later.’

‘You would not steal what the Fates have decreed should perish now.’

‘I would borrow. Find yourself a sense of fun, Kelaine.’ The boatman crossed his arms, but the stick didn’t stop its twirling. ‘And of course, I wouldn’t forget to take the price of what they saw.’

The snake’s head bumped into Sigala’s cheek again, then licked her eye. She blinked. It didn’t stop, its tongue forking in and out, in and out, tickling her just a little bit. The boatman put the cup back in his sleeve.

‘It is not our lot to be so kind to mortals, Argeiphontes.’

Flashing him another grin, the tall man held out his hand. The snakes climbed back onto it and twisted themselves around his stick.

‘I can’t help it if they call me Philandros. What’s the point of a title if you don’t use it? Well, sweetest ones, come along. Let’s get gone before Kelainos changes his mind.’

He gestured towards the way they came, and the two children hurried up the path. With the tall man behind them, the light was paler and blurrier, like the sun when you were swimming underwater. Soon it was completely gone. The man’s footsteps were still there, though, and Ammiyan’s hand was tight and warm, and Sigala kept humming as she walked. It felt like there were thousands of songs on her lips, just waiting to be sung. She wondered which ones she would show her grandmother first. She wondered if her grandmother would understand them at all.

‘Others will never know them like you do,’ said the man, as if he’d heard her thoughts. ‘With each year and each storyteller, they will change and gain different meanings. On the other hand, as long as you keep retelling them, the receiver of many will never be able to seize them all.’

‘So we are stealing them,’ said Ammiyan. They were swinging their hand, and the girl’s with it, in time with the tune.

‘Tell it how you want,’ laughed the man. ‘That’s up to you to decide.’

Their feet were in the water again, and a breeze was blowing into Sigala’s face. She opened her eyes wide, but she couldn’t see anything. There had to be clouds covering the stars. She felt around with her toes until she found dry sand, then she stepped up onto it, pulling the other child along with her. The man placed his hand along the side of her face. He pinched her cheek softly.

‘Be well, Sigala. And you, Ammiyan,’ he added in Luwian, ‘though I doubt you will be called by those names for much longer.’

His touch lifted. The girl tilted her head sideways.

‘How do you know them? And why?’

He didn’t answer. The waves swished in her back, sending up spray that pricked at her legs. A seagull cried out a long way away.

‘I think he’s gone,’ said the other child.

‘I guess, yeah.’

‘What are we going to do now?’

Sigala scrunched up her nose in thought.

‘You could come sleep at my house. I don’t think my grandmother would mind.’

‘You have room for me?’

‘Not really. But we’ll find some.’

She tugged on Ammiyan’s hand and trudged up the dunes. The sand was still warm from the sun. She looked up at the sky again, but it was still black, so black she couldn’t even see the shape of the clouds against it. Well, that didn’t matter. Her feet knew the way home by heart.

Ammiyan started singing as they walked, and she joined in. The names and stories they’d heard in the cave came easily. They sang above the sounds of the sea and the men in the port – they were up late, but that was how it was sometimes – one child in Luwian, the other one in Hellenic, and their song was even prettier because of it. It made the girl want to dance.

‘Muse,’ she called out, ‘tell me about the anger of Achilles.’

From somewhere to her left, a voice hailed the children. The person walked over crackly grass while Sigala and Ammiyan slowed down and waited. From the way he moved, he sounded like a sailor.

‘How many tunes do you know?’ he asked in Hellenic. He had an accent from the coast, Milwatos maybe.

The girl shrugged and tried to count. She couldn’t.

‘A lot,’ she said.

‘I’ll feed you if you come sing a few to my crew,’ said the man. ‘A meal for the blind children’s stories. How does that sound?’

‘We’re not blind,’ said the girl.

‘And I’m the king in Mykenai. Are you hungry or not?’

The other child shuffled forward, letting go of the girl’s hand.

‘I’m hungry,’ they mumbled in their usual Luwian.

‘Yeah,’ said Sigala. She didn’t really know what to think about what the man was saying, but she knew better than to refuse an offer of food. There wouldn’t be any at home. Not to mention sailors cooked good fish, and she’d never been on a ship from Milwatos before. ‘We’ll sing if you like,’ she added.

‘This way, then,’ said the man. He took the girl’s arm and led her and Ammiyan along with him. ‘The crew will be pleased. It’s been a long time since they heard a good story.’

Cheers came from up ahead. With a grunt, the sailor gripped Sigala under her arms and hoisted her up, until her feet were on wooden planks. There was a thud next to her. That had to be Ammiyan. She held out her hand for them to take.

‘Well then,’ said another voice. ‘What will we start with?’

The other child drew her closer.

‘I want to tell them about Wiluša,’ they whispered.

‘All right,’ the girl whispered back.

‘And the wooden horse. And all the other big and important things.’

She nodded. Ammiyan hummed a note, and she hummed a different one, one that sounded nice next to it. She remembered how the men on the beach had done it, with their voices like ship masts. She tapped her big toe on the wood to give the song a rhythm.

Then, the children’s hands swinging together, a new story began.


End file.
